CURA.

In cryptography, “encryption” is the process of encoding information converting human-readable plaintext to incomprehensible text. With its etymology relating to secret or hidden places, it becomes a highly evocative term upon which the extensive group show Poetics of Encryption is articulated at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. One of the first disclosed works is a screaming golden skull surrounded by military bullets, by Trevor Paglen. It’s circular rayed shape reminiscent of vault doors and its latin inscription which partially traslates ‘You’ve just been fucked by PSYOP’, are significant to convey a general sentiment of entrapment referred, in the context of the show, to the increasing profusion of technological systems running the everyday while keeping their functioning purposely sealed. As the visitors penetrate the dark chambers of the show they get swollen by layered hyper-technological works, as Holding Death Close (2021) by enorê – which dramatises disorientation and wayfinding through first-person adventure gaming aesthetics – or the hybrid monstrous fused deposition models by the collective Troika. Not less bewildering are the three digital commissions hosted on the dedicated website https://poeticsofencryption.kw-berlin.de.

For example the six chapters mixed-reality film-biome Scraper (2023) by Most Dismal Swamp immerses the viewer into a labyrinthine multi-user hallucination. From babel-like towers under the supervision of a city administrator with no master key to caves of relics and high tech membranes, populated by angels and ex k-holes forecasters which gather in eerie DIY folk concerts. The six dense mixed-reality films explore the integration of digital technologies in human life, as well as ritualised collectivity beyond the human and its technological mediation. It gobbles me up, says one of the narrating voices. And it’s true: one could spend hours “scraping” not just this digital commission, but the entire show. The technological muddiness evoked is paired with its apparent opposite as more sterile and aseptic works like the glass laptops by Tilman Hornig or the cryptic acoustic sculpture anti (2004) by Cartsen Nicolai, convey in aesthetic terms concepts of respectively transparency and un-penetrability, specifically related to computation. Poetics of Encryption rotates around topics ranging from algorithmic governance to artificial life, art, and (digital) afterlives, unfolding counter-narratives to Big Tech’s claims regarding transparency and openness, and considering how a rhetoric of transparency can, in fact, obscure the truth. Such tension – between being locked in and locked out, bogged down as inscrutable systems rule the everyday – gains further complexity as the show attempts to consider how super-dense digital archives and computational processes scramble distinctions among access and exclusion, or private and public, thus allowing a paradoxical existence at the verge of sense and nonsense. Here strolls the eight legged taxidermy cat Panorama Cat (2022) by Eva and Franco Mattes, while Clusterducks’s mind-blowing memescape is organised as a physical wall-archive and eloquently titled The Detective Wall (2020-2024). Allegorising the search function, is also Jon Rafman You, The World, and I (2023) in which an anonymous narrator seeks to retrieve a photographic representation of a former paramour using Google Street View and Google Earth. The work reimagines the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and a descending in an Internet age of surveillance and digital afterlives.

The exhibition finds its origins within the book written by its curator, Nadim Samman, titled Poetics of Encryption: Art and the Technocene and published in 2023 by Hatje Cantz. From this, it takes both its organisation in the three main speculative landscapes mapped by obscurity – Black Sites, Black Boxes, and Black Holes – and its aim to survey how contemporary art responds to an emerging tech capturing its users, and working in secret; while distorting cultural understanding of space-time. Analogue and digital media featuring historic and newly commissioned works by more than 40 international artists live such opaque terrain, embodying its darkness. Their number, duration and density makes it hard to orient oneself. That’s not to say the show remains encrypted, rather it conveys complex sites of superimposed meanings and a new sublime. A bottomless well, an event-horizon, a point of no return.